The World Before Us (34 page)

Jane and Blake stop along a slope of alder three quarters of the way up the trail, and from there Jane can make out the glow of a fire. The grotto’s roof is lit up: an orange waver visible through the rails of the trees. Blake takes Jane’s hand again and leads her farther up, breaking twigs and kicking aside fallen branches as he goes. Toward the top the easy chatter of two men’s voices cuts clearly through the night air, while a radio news report runs underneath their conversation.

About eighty feet from the clearing Blake stops, still within the cover of the trees but level to the men, who sit on fold-out chairs in puffy coats, a pit fire between them. Jane turns to ask Blake what they’re doing up here, and in turning realizes that it isn’t the pit fire lighting the grotto but a carpet of votive candles laid over the grotto’s floor—dozens of them, flickering under the limestone. The man in the tweed cap gets up and pulls a can of lager out of a nearby cooler, tosses a bag of crisps at his mate.

Blake whispers in Jane’s ear, “It’s a vigil for the trapped miners. Half the village has been taking turns. The big guy on the left is a friend of my dad’s.” He inclines his head toward the grotto. “Wanna say hello?”

Jane shakes her head no and rubs the sides of her arms to warm herself. She can see that the plinth and sculpture are gone and that a
sagging placard leans against the grotto wall.
Day 14
is written on it in black marker, the
13
and
12
beside it crossed out. Jane recalls the news report she’d heard on the drive from London: the days it might take the rescue workers to drill an air hole, the months it might take to bring the men to the surface. Her own problems suddenly feel small.

Watching the men keep their vigil, Jane thinks about her own choice to hold on so tightly to what happened to Lily. She has chosen to live in the past, just as she’s chosen to lie to Blake, to lie—through omission—to almost everyone.

Over by the pit fire one of the men laughs heartily at something his companion has said, and their ease with each other, and the ease Jane feels with Blake, is strangely comforting. She drops her head onto Blake’s shoulder and he turns and kisses her forehead, says, “Tell me when you’re ready to head down.”

The cottages that back onto the falls are a poorer version of the limestone houses that sit along the river: one-storey structures that would have been built for the men who ran the Farrington properties—the stable manager and head gardener—or for the local headmaster or a village merchant. Most of the houses are dark as we walk past them, their tenants sleeping, and so Blake has to guide Jane along the pavement until they get to the farthest house, the one with a light in its back kitchen.

For us there is often no difference between what we see in the world and what we watch on the telly. Actions set in motion by the living can feel like scenes so far removed from us that any act of intercession on our part seems impossible. In this way, the window in the cottage at the end of the road is not unlike a film screen, one on which a girl of fifteen or sixteen appears in flannel pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, opening a kitchen cupboard at the back of the house to pull out a box of cereal.
This is where we find Cat and the children—peering between the gaping curtains as the teenager roots around in the refrigerator for milk.

“Cat found the twooms,” the girl says when she senses our presence behind her.

“The
twooms
?” the one with the soft voice asks.

“Headstones,” Cat explains, “up from the gate in the woods. Not very big. Probably the Farrington family’s dogs.”

“
Ruff-ruff,
” barks our girl, watching as the teenager scoops cereal out of a blue ceramic bowl and deposits it in her mouth. “I’m hungry.”

“Me too,” says the boy, which is what he always says when the girl mentions food. Even though he knows that what he feels is not actual hunger, he likes the idea that his needs concern us, that because we are adults, all forms of provision fall under our sway.

John leans toward the boy. “You’re not hungry. At least, not in the way that you think you are.”

“The cottages have changed,” the theologian states, tired of the tenor of the conversation. “There used to be wood-beam ceilings here.”

We bend forward to look at the ceiling, even though we are tired of indulging the theologian. He’s been making emphatic statements since we arrived at Inglewood:
These houses are new; the old stables are gone; the pub has a different sign
. His proclamations were exciting at first, but now, as there’s little to set them against—no facts, no dissenting opinions—they’ve become tedious.

Even in the dim light from the kitchen we can see that the ceiling is plaster. We can also see the reflective sheen of a flat-screen television, the blinking dots of DVD and CD players, a stereo with large speakers—various signs of modernity. On the mantel there’s a digital photo frame sliding a series of bright images across its screen, like a magician shuffling a deck of cards.

“There was ivy here,” the theologian continues, “all over the front of the house.” And maybe because we want to believe him, or maybe
because there once was, some of us picture rustling vines covering the cottage, imagine this whole row of houses hunkered alongside the falls in shaggy green coats.

“I remember ivy,” the boy says.

“Hedera helix,”
the idiot chimes. “
Helix
from the Ancient Greek—” and he stops because he expects to be interrupted, even though no one opens their mouth to silence him.

Inside the kitchen the teenager stands up. She places her empty bowl in the sink and switches off the light. A second light goes on in another, more distant room before a door shuts and drops us back into near-darkness.

“Where’d she go?” the girl asks.

“To sleep,” the poet says.

“I want to sleep,” the girl says. “I’m sleepy too.” She fake-yawns.

“You
are
sleeping,” the theologian replies.

The girl shakes her head; she doesn’t like to be told this. She moves up to the window and taps it lightly with her fingers.

“Don’t—” the theologian commands, more sharply than he should.

Over on the mantel the photo frame is still lit up and the girl watches the years slip across it: the teenager we just watched morphing into a chubby eight-year-old holding the handlebars of a bicycle with pink streamers. Then she is ten, and standing on a bristly field in a football shirt; then thirteen or fourteen in a peach-coloured dress, under a cluster of green balloons; then a young girl again: she and her mum holding up cake beaters covered in batter in a floral-papered kitchen.

“I want to go
home
,” the girl says, and she turns and waits for one of us to do something.

But none of us steps forward because, like her, we have no sense of how to get there.

We like to believe in the resilience of children, and sometimes, watching them—our own two, or the boys down the hall in Jane’s
building, or Lewis’s daughters—we marvel at the vibrancy of their imaginations, their ability to cordon off one version of reality from a preferred alternative. In the real world children grow. They learn to toggle between the actual and the imagined in new ways, eventually settling in a domain that allows them to walk to the corner shop on their own, master multiplication tables and graphs, write letters and essays, make their own decisions. We are less sure about how knowledge is gained here, in the half-light of our existence, or how such knowledge will serve the boy and the girl, though we agreed long ago it would be wrong to lie to them. Even at the gravestones that bear the moss-clad names of the Farrington pets—“Beck,” “Duke,” “Cato,” “Cicero,” “Tip”—Cat had asked the children if they knew what the markers were for, if they understood what
buried
meant. The girl said yes, but the boy wasn’t listening; he was tracing the weathered letters, trying to find a familiar name.

We plod back toward the inn caught up in our own concerns. Jane and Blake had gone ahead while we dallied at the cottages and we let them go—the boy distracted by the falls and the rest of us not wanting to leave him. Now, as we walk, the girl is worrying her way around the contradiction we’ve set up: the idea that she is both awake and sleeping. The poet tries to make it clear to her, explaining that just as her hunger is not
real
hunger, she is not sleeping in the way she used to sleep; this is a different kind of dream. She shakes her head at this and he tries again, saying sadly that the girl with the cereal bowl is
alive
, “whereas you, little flower, are dead.”

In the early days of our interrogations the question we were most afraid to ask each other was “How did you die?” It held in its husk the possibility that some strain of suffering might be remembered. It was more pleasing to ask what kind of music one preferred, what kind of food one favoured, if a spouse or children came to mind when we said the
word
family
. It was easier to tug out of the mind memories like “terrier” or “clockworks” or “a wall of drawers in a long narrow shop” than the last thing the body remembered.

One of our final interrogations took place at the museum. Jane was collating the Lyell glassware archives for auction and we’d wandered upstairs. The one who never spoke was in the alcove in the science gallery by a tall window, and having just asked the poet a set of questions and getting no response but metered verse, we turned to the figure in the nook.

“What clothes can you see yourself wearing?” we asked. “Where is your house?” “Are you old or young?” A dozen more questions followed: “What colours do you like?” “Are you of faith?” “Have you seen the sea?” But the figure stayed mute.

The theologian grew impatient and snapped, “How did you die?”—as if this were an equally weighted question. To which the figure by the window
cawk
ed and then released a long slow whistle, as if falling from a great height.

The idiot once told us that learning is not the same as knowing. “
Integer non scientes,
” he’d groaned when the rest of us exclaimed
aha
at a trivial detail that Jane was reading in her office. We made no distinction back then between those bits of information that drifted through us and the larger ideas we could retain, the kind of knowledge we could build on. We always asked, “When will we know ourselves?” never “When will we know ourselves
enough
?”

When the poet told the girl that she was dead, the boy overheard. Now the girl is walking dolefully beside Cat and the boy is scuffing his feet, though he keeps turning to look back at the field. We have dispelled their happiness before, but it never gets any easier. Once, in Jane’s flat, the girl shrieked loudly during a game she and the boy were playing, and Jane turned her head to where the girl was standing. It was a game the children liked: they chose a letter, and whenever the radio announcer
said a word that started with that letter, the girl or the boy won a point; the first to reach a score of fifteen won the game. That day, the girl picked
P
and the boy
M
. It was a frosty winter weekend and Jane was gathering her things to go Christmas shopping. The broadcaster was interviewing an astronomer called Peter. At one point a whole sentence of
P
s—“extrasolar planet,” “parsecs,” “Outer Earth Project”—erupted and the girl shrieked in delight. Jane stopped, keys in hand, on her way to turn off the radio, and glanced to where the girl was standing beside the kitchen counter.

“She heard that,” the boy said. “Do it again!”

And the girl made the happy sound, but not as loudly as before.

We all turned to Jane. She clicked the radio off, opened the cupboard and shrugged her coat on. In the kitchen Sam padded through us to inspect his bowl. Wrapping a wool scarf around her neck Jane glanced once more at the spot where the girl was standing, then ran her eyes over the newspaper folded on the end of the counter, the coffee mug in the sink, as if she were forgetting something.

“She saw me!” the girl said, and the boy leapt off his kitchen stool and went to stand next to the girl, windmilling his arms.

“No she didn’t,” the theologian sighed, but some of us weren’t convinced, wanted to believe the children.

“Are you sure?” Cat asked.

“Of course I am,” the theologian said, and he walked right up to Jane, close enough to see the flecks of mascara under her lash line, the fine baby hair on her cheek.

“Because?” the girl begged.

Jane opened the door and we moved to follow her.

“Because,” the theologian said gruffly, “the living only see what’s useful.”

• • •

Just before we reach the inn the boy runs ahead and the girl follows him. The rest of us discuss whether Blake will be in Jane’s bed when we get to the room, and the musician hums, and the poet grunts the way he did earlier, like a rutting pig. We debate whether Jane will stay in Inglewood longer than she said she would; we can sense that she is light-headed at having slipped away from the world of accountability. When she thinks about the Chester and the work she dropped there, about what happened with William, she pushes the thought out of her head and instead thinks about Inglewood House, and the Whitmore, and us. This makes us happy, even though we know it shouldn’t. But we also know it won’t last. We know this just as we know Gareth will have phoned Lewis when Jane didn’t return his calls or show up for work on Monday. Just like we know that Lewis will have tried calling the cottage by now, will have gone round to Jane’s flat and found her mobile. Lewis is probably up at the Lakes already, trying to find her.